It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen. - Jerome K. Jerome

A comparison of revenue contribution by employees of top five players in India and the US in this space shows that an American IT professional contributes nearly ten times higher to the company's turnover than his Indian counterpart.

Among the top five Indian IT firms -- TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Satyam Computer and HCL Tech -- TCS is the biggest in terms of annual revenue, but Azim Premji-led Wipro steals the show in terms of revenue per employee.

But even Wipro's per employee revenue of just over 51,000 dollars gets dwarfed when compared to the Fortune 500-listed IT companies in the US, where an employee contributes at least 1,00,000 dollars to the company's annual turnover.

The figure for TCS stood at close to 48,000 dollars, with annual turnover of 4.3 billion dollars and head count of over 89,400 employees at the end of last fiscal.

Wipro had annual revenues of 3.5 billion dollars and total head count of over 67,800 people last year.

Infosys' per employee contribution was close to 43,000 dollars with total revenue of 3.1 billion dollars and over 72,200 employees.

The average revenue per employee (ARPE) of the five largest IT earners in India stood at 42,000 dollars last fiscal year, against 4,10,000 dollars in the top five in the US -- HP, IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems and EDS.